From the Forbes’s article which attempts to persuade us that Obamacare really is chock full of puppy dogs and sunshine just as Obama promised:

Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

That sounds all well and good until you stop and think about it. Who decides what constitutes “underspending”? Ultimately, under Obamacare, prices will be driven up through inflation as outrageous hospital bills are presented as evidence along with insurance companies’s counter-proposals that they are “underspending”.

A concrete example of this would be my recent experience my fourth child’s birth.

By the fourth child you pretty much know what’s going on and, barring any complications, things generally tend to go like clockwork. Well thankfully that’s pretty much what happened in our case. Biologically the birth was seamless, labor for about 2 hours, 3 pushes, and we welcome our son into the world.

So what could I possibly say about an uninteresting birth to show how Obamacare is such a terrible idea?

Enter the nurses.

When we arrived at the hospital we were taken to the prep room where my wife was to change into a hospital gown, get checked, and wait for the room to be prepared for us. It took my wife about 5 minutes to get prepared and it was apparently somewhat of a slow day so rooms were available and already prepped. But it still took us about 30 minutes to get into one. Why? Apparently there are new regulations which call for the nurses to play 20 questions with the mother-to-be before she can be admitted into a room. This process took so long that the mid-wife, who is not considered a medical professional by the way, decided to cut in and actually check how far along my wife was. I’m glad she did, too, because my wife was basically ready to deliver right then.

We were quickly whisked into a delivery room where the nurse playing 20 questions was joined by a team of nurses whose primary focus was to give my wife an IV because she had tested positive for strep and according to their regulations the mother needed to have at least two doses of an antibiotic before giving birth, a process which they expected to take about 20 minutes. Keep in mind at this point my wife was completely ready, biologically, to give birth.

This IV was so important to the hospital staff that they called in at least 4 different nurses to try and find a vein. After the fourth my wife finally told them she couldn’t hold back anymore and would push whether they liked it or not. I passed the last nurse who had tried to give my wife the IV in the hall later and overheard her complaining to the head nurse about how she didn’t want to get written up because procedures hadn’t been followed to the letter. So all the nurses run out into the hall way to discuss the situation and how to reconcile what is happening in the delivery room to their procedures, leaving us alone with only the midwife in the room.

And that’s how we welcomed my 3rd son into the world. With the medical professionals debating their procedures in the hallway while the non-medical professionals, unencumbered by a sense of obligation to follow procedure or the threat of the loss of our jobs if we failed to follow that procedure, got the job done.

The following morning my wife was cleared to leave by her doctor about 12 hours after giving birth but the nurses wouldn’t let her go until she had been there a minimum of 24 hours because, once again, procedure had to be followed.

Two weeks later we received the bills from the hospital. All told the hospital is charging about $14,000 for about 12 hours worth of work and since its itemized we get to see that my wife was given an $11 aspirin (single pill) and my son was given a $6 passifier (we bought a two-pack of the same passifier from a store for less than $4). Thankfully we won’t have to pay the full $14,000+ bill. My employer has graciously provided me with an insurance plan I had no say in and that plan is supposed to help deflate the bill somewhat. By how much we don’t know yet, hopefully it won’t be more than what we budgeted.

And that brings be back to why the bomb the Forbes article tries to tell us is actually a good thing is not, in fact, a good thing.

You see, the insurance company is rightly going to counter the hospital’s outrageous bill with a statement of how much they think it should be and they will base their percentage of coverage on that. Under Obamacare it seems the insurance company will simply be forced to pay whatever magic numbers the bean counters at the hospital dream up. In other words, we will be moving from a badly damaged pseudo-market system to a completely centrally controlled one where the prices charged have absolutely no relation to the real world at all. The hospital can charge thousands of dollars for an aspirin and under Obamacare insurance companies will be forced to pay every cent either then or later after the customer has been stuck with the bill. Either way the result is the same, the cost of medical care will skyrocket because of their government-granted monopoly.

Of course that’s not the only change that will take place. The other part of Obamacare is, as the Forbes article rightly notes, the destruction of any “for-profit” insurance company. Meaning the only insurers who will be able to survive such lunacy are insurance companies that don’t have to operate according to the virtuous system of profit and loss. It is, as was noted before Obamacare passed, the perfect scenario for sneaking in through the backdoor a universal healthcare system.

Now you might be thinking at this point that free healthcare for everyone sounds like a great idea. But there are two catches to that notion.

One is the simple fact that nothing is free. Defenders of other socialized healthcare systems like to point to how their cost of medical care is cheaper than ours. But if the cost of medical care is fixed by the state then such a claim makes no sense since it cannot be objectively compared to anything else. Remember that $11 aspirin? We only know that such a price is outrageous because we have a much more free market outside the hospital which currently charges as little as .0001 cents per pill.1 If the prices were fixed, as they were during World War II for many goods, we simply have no way to know whether we are being over or under charged.2

The other is that the further you remove the good or service provider from the person paying for the good or service, the less of an incentive the provider has for making sure what they are providing is worthwhile to the consumer. The insistence of the nurses to follow procedure rather than attend to the actual medical need highlights this point.

It would help to drive costs down if I were the one paying for my care, even if I leveraged an insurance company who is my client and not my employers’, and if I were the one who got to determine my care, instead of merely accepting whatever the doctors and nurses dictated to me.

The answer to our healthcare problem is not more intervention. Its freedom.

A liberal friend of mine sent me this article from Forbes which attempts to argue that “Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798”

From the article:

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed –“An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

There’s a few problems with comparing this 2 page law with the 2,000 monstrosity that is Obamacare. Here’s a short list:

Not everyone was employed AS a seamen, so off the bat this bill was worlds away from the mandate levied by Obamacare on every US citizen just for breathing.

The mandate was applied per ship, not per sailor. The only things recorded were the counts of seamen aboard. The fine of $100 was to be levied against the ship, not the individual crew members. This was really more of a payroll tax than anything else.

The seamen had the free choice of which port to go to, meaning there was interstate competition among ports with regard to this service.

The care was not open-ended and not lifetime. When your money ran out, you were kicked out. Oh, and pre-existing condition were not treated. This bill was specifically designed to alleviate the arduous effects of long-term sea voyage for the purpose of international trade. It was effectively an insurance plan for sailors, not much different than seafaring insurance plans that were already in place at the time to make intercontinental commerce less of a financially risky endeavor.

Doctors were not mandated to work at ports. In fact, this plan says nothing about the coverage provided. Its amazing to think that anyone would compare this with Obamacare when the medical care provided is not listed. The only thing the bill does stipulate with regard to the service is how the overseers of the port hospitals will be appointed by the president.

The money collected never left the port it was collected in. That’s what they used to call “states’ rights”.

The wording of the bill focuses on accounting. It actually expects there to be a surplus left over!

This bill was also far from uncontested as many posts that want to use this as ammunition to support Obamacare seem to imply.

Contra to Politifact, the government takeover of healthcare, characterized by the existence of strict government oversight as to who gets what treatment when and where (aka, “death panels”), or none at all, is very real.

If you are providing health insurance only with the permission of the federal government, government has taken over your health insurance.

Actually, if its such a lie that Obamacare is not a takeover of the healthcare industry, why has it already been ruled unconstitutional, specifically for its provision regulating economic inactivity? Not buying healthcare now carries with it the possible penalty of jail time.

What is truly amazing is that in spite of all of these facts, liberal organizations like Polifact feel no shame in attempting to sweep it all under the rug by calling it a great big lie. As if we had made all of the preceding facts up and were merely out “to scare people”.

Hope and change is only worthwhile if whats hoped for is clearly defined and real and what is changed is well-vetted (remember that whole 5-day public disclosure, “we’ll televise the ‘debate’ on C-SPAN” mess?) and avoids as best as possible unintended consequences like those mentioned above.

Why should Christians in particular care about all of this? Because Obamacare funds lifestyles and choices (thereby encouraging them) that are in direct opposition to our faith. Sure, free market capitalism makes such things possible, but it does not force others to fund something they fundamentally disagree with. Also, Obamacare costs money, a lot of it. More money in the government’s pockets means less money in our pockets (because the government cannot create, only take, wealth). So even the weakest churches should be up in arms about Obamacare because more money going to the government means less money in the offering plate.

Even the title of the post, “The cost in lives of Richard Land’s health reform repeal”, is meant to imply that the healthcare reform pill recently shoved down Americans’ throats designed to treat America’s healthcare woes has no negative side effects.

Since many people share the same delusion that BaptistPlanet apparently does, I’d like to provide “the other side of the story”. Yes,

It is a fact that Obamacare has caused huge hikes in premiums. We are well aware now that Obama was lying to everyone when he said that if we liked our current healthcare plans we could keep them.

Secondly, Obamacare is modeled after socialist plans like the British National Health Services. And if socialized medicine is as awesome as BaptistPlanet seems to think it is, we would expect to hear nothing but rave reviews from the British people. Right?

The truth is that socialized medicine has been shown to degrade medical care across the board because instead of the free market (or limited as our case is thanks to lawmakers) deciding your healthcare options, a centralized planning commission

The problem of scarcity plagues all systems, including government run ones. So the argument that a “lack” of a something kills someone is really just an admission that the one posing the argument understands next to nothing about economics.

According to Obama, if you are too old to make the death panels, I mean healthcare commissioners care about saving your life, you can just take a pill.

So the next time you encounter someone like BaptistPlanet who is apparently suffering from the delusion that socialized medical care is only good and contains no negative side effects, be sure to offer them the red pill of reality. Even if they refuse to take it (hey, its a free world, right?) at least they will know that not everyone shares their insanity.

That’s an all-around big government problem. You rarely see citizens rioting because they didn’t work hard and therefore have less, what you find are people rioting because they are lazy and want the state to provide for them. [↩]